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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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There's a very legit purpose here. No one is stealing burritos, but quite possibly Chipotle is seeing lots of CC fraud.

Suppose you have a bunch of stolen CCs, about 75% of which have already been reported stolen, and you plan to buy a bunch of x-boxes from Walmart with them. If you pickup an order placed online with card reported as stolen, you face the risk of Walmart calling the cops who walk out to the online order pickup parking and arrest you.

So what you do is before buying the x-box you want to test the credit card by making a low value/low suspicion purchase that you don't face the risk of arrest for. A burrito from a national chain (which you never pick up) works nicely.

This is a huge pain for chipotle. They pay penalties on the shady purchases and have the fraudulent transactions eventually clawed back (messing with cashflow). Also uneaten burritos aren't free to produce.

By requiring 2FA you make it costlier for scammers to play this game. (And "costlier" != "impossible". I know you can get a SIM card for $20 at the tmobile store, but now you've just made using a stolen card $20 more expensive and required the scammer to make an extra trip.)